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Evans: The danger in wishful thinking on oil

By Clay Evans

Posted:
07/14/2013 01:00:00 AM MDT

James Howard Kunstler knows a lot of people think he's a fool right about now. He's OK with that. Just wait, he says.

Back in 2005 Kunstler published "The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century." Such a brief description is inadequate, but rode the "peak oil" wave that argued that humanity was on the verge of a massive crisis when the era of cheap petroleum came to an end.

I called Kunstler and wrote a column headlined, "Oil Peak? Uh-Oh" that ran in the May 8, 2005, Daily Camera. In it I wrote, "Is Kunstler just our era's Paul Erhlich, whose dire 1968 prediction of a 'population bomb' hasn't gone off yet?"

Fast forward eight years and things have changed unexpectedly; tricky thing, history. According to a new Carnegie Endowment report, humanity has to date consumed 1.2 trillion barrels but "Calculations of today's economic reserves -- those that are technologically recoverable at current prices -- are on the order of 6.5 trillion barrels. However, experience suggests that the share of recoverable oil grows as economic conditions and technological innovation change." Among other things, this means that the United States will become the world's largest oil exporter by 2020.

Take that, Saudi Arabia.

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As the report noted, "Nobody predicted the extraordinary surge in North American oil production." It's all being done through new technologies, including horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing -- fracking -- methods of extraction for oil sands, gas-to-liquid and coal-to-liquid processes and deep-water drilling.

So, to paraphrase Joel Goodson in "Risky Business," it's time we all said "What the heck!" and -- to quote the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince -- let's go crazy! The stuff will never run out! Par-tay!

"I've taken a stand and made statements. Because of the nature of what has gone on the last few years, it makes me look foolish," Kunstler says. "I just have to soldier through that. But I have a serene conviction that my version of the story is probably more correct than the other side's."

So what is his story?

"What we are seeing now is an enormous amount of wishful thinking by people who ought to know better but don't," he says flatly.

His argument is more or less what it was in 2005. Yes, there are plenty of "reserves" of petroleum. But the question is, can you get to it economically? The cheap oil that fueled the automobile and technological ages in America, the "low-hanging fruit," is long gone. Now we have to go to ever more forbidding places and use increasingly inefficient processes to extract oil.

For example, everybody's all giddy about shale oil. But a "classic" east Texas oil well from the boom years, Kunstler says, cost about $400,000 to drill in 2013 dollars. For that amount, oil would flow in rivers, sometimes for decades.

"They produced thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of barrels a day. Some had flow like that for decades, drilled in the 1930s and they were still easily getting a thousand barrels a day in 1960. That is a long time," he says. Even a "stripper" well, one that was basically tapped out, could "still squeeze out 10 barrels a day."

In contrast, a shale-oil well in the Bakken formation in north central North America costs between $6.5 and $10 million to drill and produces around 80 barrels a day. What's more, Kunstler says, such wells are almost always wrung dry in five years or less.

"What people don't understand is the relationship between capital and oil production. ... When the energy becomes too expensive or non-economical, it's barely worth getting out of the ground," he says. Then, he argues, there isn't sufficient capital to plow back into the energy sector and production inevitably declines.

Same goes for tar sands and remote extraction beneath the Arctic, and so on.

But, Kunstler says, we all have a vested interest in the wishful thinking because nobody wants to give up our cushy, oil-driven lifestyles. Petroleum is almost literally part of everything we do or consume, in fact -- as in plastics or fertilizers -- or as an input -- the diesel that powered the truck that brought that tomato from California.

Kunstler is not the only one still sounding the alarm. Arthur Berman, Bill Powers and other independent oil analysts have said the shale-oil bubble will burst sooner than anyone expects. Alas, we've done exactly nothing to prepare for a future of oil made more scarce due to the expense of extraction. In 2005, Kunstler was suggesting things like investing in the national rail system and gearing up for more community-oriented economies and moving away from the suburban model. We didn't do anything like that and with the latest "Yee-haw!" about endless oil forever, we won't now.

"I didn't call the book 'The Long Emergency' for nothing," he says. "Shale oil bought this culture a little time, but I don't think it's going to be more than five years. ... We're still cruising for a bruising."

And let's not forget how much carbon we'll produce burning all those supposed trillions of barrels.

So, is James Howard Kunstler just this era's version of Paul Erhlich? Who knows? I told him I'd call back in another few years and see where we are. If things aren't going the way he predicts by then, the answer may just be yes.

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